But the moment you throw open the red-sequinned double doors from the hall into the main living area, stand at the top of semi-circular steps that just demand a Ginger Rogers entrance and take in the sheer scale of the place – and the fact that it has a full-size bowling alley in the sitting room – you understand that its owners were up to the task. 

Laurie and Sol Parker are clearly not afraid to make a statement. Or take on a challenge.

The first thing that might have put off the less bold, is that the building had never been a home before, in its 150 years plus history. It started out as a purpose-built Turkish bath – ‘the most luxurious in England’, according to the advertisement from an 1864 newspaper, that Laurie Parker has had enlarged and framed in one of the bathrooms. But its policy to have a ladies’ day (as also stated in the ad) proved too scandalous for the bourgeoisie of Victorian St Leonards and it didn’t last very long in that incarnation.

Sold to a local girls’ school, they added a whole new wooden vaulted structure at the back to house a swimming pool. In the 1920s, the pool was boarded over and the space became first a spiritualist church and then, after the local parish church was bombed in WW2, a Church of England one, where many marriages, christenings and funerals took place. 

A couple who got married there in the 1950s, now in their nineties, have knocked on the door since Laurie and Sol have been in residence. (Oh, to have seen their faces…)

The Bath House’s last pre-Parker family role was as a glass factory, making the specialist vessels for laboratories. By the time Laurie and Sol first viewed the place in 2013, the factory was long closed down, although all the stock and machinery was still there. With trees growing through it.

But even getting to that viewing was a challenge, as Laurie explains – and all the more extraordinary that they kept going, considering they had visited Hastings only once, when they started on their marathon Bath House journey.

“We came down from London and walked the dogs on beautiful Camber Sands. We saw the signs for Rye and Battle and went on to Hastings. We looked round all the antique shops and loved it. Sol immediately started looking on Zoopla and other listing sites for houses in Hastings and found this place at the bottom of the list… it was described as ‘the Wreck of the Hesperus’, but it didn’t put us off.

“It was a nightmare even to see it. The agents told us ‘we’re not showing it, we’re sick of time wasters’. In the end, we contacted the agent’s head office in London and then we were told ‘we’ve lost the keys’ or the person we’d made the appointment with ‘wasn’t there’.

“Even once we’d made an offer we had to have an interview with the owner – he wanted to know what we were going to do with it as it had been his father’s glass factory.”

Those hurdles would have been enough to put less determined buyers off – and it turned out to have been just the start.

“We bought it in 2013 and started renovating after a year. The entire building was completely derelict and the main space was very dark and dingy. There were even plants growing through the walls, and old machines from the abandoned glass factory had been left all over the place.

“We were determined to preserve as much of the original structure as we could. We knew immediately we wanted to keep it open plan and not carve it up into bedroom pods, so we had to build up to get three bedrooms to accommodate the three boys. 

“It’s Grade II listed, so the conditions were very, very strict. We hadn’t done any renovation before, but we’d watched Grand Designs and thought it was easy…We were wonderfully naïve and horrifically underestimated everything. We had to deal with conservation and building control totally contradicting each other – and we were still living in London while we did it.”

Despite all that, two years later it was done – and the result is a simply glorious three-bedroom family home, with all the features a modern family could desire, including a fluid social/kitchen/dining space and a bespoke screening room. And a bowling alley of course, as you do.

“It used to be in Soho House,” says Laurie. “Sol heard they were getting rid of it and asked if he could buy it and they told him, if he took it out, he could have it. We didn’t even know if it would fit in the space, but luckily it slotted in to the millimetre.”

And it looks like it’s always been there, with lockers containing different-sized bowling shoes and old cinema seats to sit on to put them on completing the scene. The fairground attraction effect of the bowling lane’s clown face is set off by other items around the space, including a huge neon sign saying ‘Carnival’ – by the late neon artist and designer Chris Bracey, who owned Gods Own Junkyard in London – over the double doors and a basketball hoop arcade game. “Sol gave that to me one Christmas,” says Laurie, “because I used to play netball at county level.”

It’s impossible not to have a go on it – or in my case, about 500, because it’s so addictive – and then it seems the most natural thing in the world to shuffle over to the vintage shuffleboard table and have a few games of that. 

Shuffleboard is an old pub game, like a miniature version of curling, where you slide pucks along a sanded wood surface and try and reach the highest score level, while knocking off your opponent’s puck. 

“The bowling alley used to be in Soho House,” says Laurie. “Sol heard they were getting rid of it and asked if he could buy it and they told him, if he took it out, he could have it. We didn’t even know if it would fit in the space, but it slotted in to the millimetre.”

Photographer, David Merewether was much better at it than me, but that didn’t put me off trying and we had to tear ourselves away from these distractions and remind ourselves we were there to do a job. After a very short while at The Bath House it is easy to understand how apt that carnival sign is. It would be hard to imagine a better party house.

Adding to the convivial mood is the dining table which forms the entrance to the kitchen area – it seats a casual 14 people. “It’s built from off-cuts from Champagne barrels,” says Laurie. “A carpenter made it for us for £800.” Whilst the whole – huge and amply cupboarded – kitchen was made from old pallet boards. 

Continuing the inventive scheme, the cocktail bar is an old carpenter’s bench and a row of vintage gym lockers makes a brilliant pantry, with genres of food items filed in each one. Like many of the one-off items in The Bath House, both of these came from eBay. “Sol is eBay’s best friend,” says Laurie.

But while eBay may be Sol’s go-to site, Laurie is the queen of Google – and the amazing suppliers she has found on there had me giving her (entirely unsolicited) career advice that she should start a business as The Resourceress. She can find anything, at a brilliant price and, more often than not, locally – the couple bought their Arne Jacobsen chairs from the traders in Hastings Old Town and a selection of light fittings from 20th Century Filth in St Leonards.

The fish-scale style copper splashback behind the kitchen sink was the result of a search for local panel beaters. The poured concrete worktops were brought into being after she found a YouTube video of how to do it and showed their builders. “I convinced them they could do it,” she says.

All over the house is the fabulous result of another of Laurie’s searches – bespoke industrial (not ‘industrial style’, the real thing) steel light switches and plug points embossed with the words The Bath House.

“The space needed industrial light switches. The repro ones are rubbish and vintage are very expensive, so I did a Google search and sourced a foundry in Hove which could make them all for us.”

Another of Laurie’s searches resulted in the knock-out copper boat bath in the wonderful Turkish bath-inspired en-suite bathroom off the guest bedroom. Laurie had decided she wanted this style to be a feature in the room – according to her decorating philosophy of starting with one eye-catching item and letting the rest of the room treatment follow – but they’re eye wateringly expensive. 

“We bought it in 2013 and started renovating after a year. It was derelict and the main space was dark and dingy, plants were growing through the walls and machines from the abandoned factory were all over the place.”

But not one to take that as a cue to settle for something less thrilling, Laurie tracked down the company that makes them in Morocco and ordered one direct… £6,000 cheaper. Actually, she ordered two; there’s another one upstairs in the master bedroom. “We had to be resourceful,” she says with impressive modesty.

The combined impact of one feature piece and Laurie’s inventiveness carries on in the boys’ bedroom, across the hall, in the original bath house part of the building. This is set up as a triple-decker bunk room, in the American style, with enough space for seven excited children. Laurie sketched it and the builders, Grant and Tom, made it. 

The fourth door in the hall – there is also a chic black and white bathroom, featuring an Art Deco basin, which Sol bought from builders renovating a flat in Mayfair, for a princely £20 – opens onto a stairwell with flights up and down. This features a wonderful circus light bought from their friend Samantha Bruce of the brilliant vintage resource In House Junkie (whose house was featured in Wealden Times June 2018), another source of many of the great original pieces in the house.

Down the steps is another brilliant light feature in the form of a rotating ‘now showing’ cinema light, in front of the ‘box office’ for the adjoining screening room. This has a giant built-in modular sofa, big enough to take the same seven kids who will later be romping around upstairs in the bunkroom and large amounts of popcorn.

Next to that is a basement laundry room like something out of Das Boot, painted battleship grey to encourage the association, and at the end of that – just in case this wasn’t already the dream home for boys – a secret tunnel, which pops up in the kitchen…

Though perfect for a tribe of boys the house may be, their educational needs are forcing Sol and Laurie to move everyday life to a new house back up towards Sevenoaks, where Sol’s two older boys are at school.

For now, the future of the amazing Bath House for the Parker family remains open. They might make it available as a special rental, or if the offer is right adept negotiator Sol (he’s an agent for major musicians) says he might sell. After all the work they’ve done, it must be a tough choice.

Head back up from the basement to the top of the stairs and you arrive at the new upper floor, which Laurie and Sol added to give them a master bedroom with its own bathroom – cleverly tucked behind a wall panel the bed sits in front of – and a dressing room on the landing. 

With a sea view out of a porthole-style window, next to the boat bath, this room has a very maritime feel – enhanced by a vintage life belt from Saltdean Lido they bought in Greenwich Market long before The Bath House entered their lives. It looks as though it has been bought exactly for that spot – a happy serendipity that seems to have played out in the whole house. 

“We sourced as much as we could locally and by the time it was finished, we couldn’t remember what we had, but when we got it all out, it all fitted and the colours just went together.”

Which makes you think that if you put enough effort and determination into a project, in the end the details can seem to sort themselves out. Acts of faith rewarded.